I received my first badge sometime during my elementary school years. I went through quite a growth spurt. At some point two large ridges of flesh appeared. Caramel colored fault lines along each shoulder where the skin yielded to the rate at which it was asked to grow.In my senior year in high school, I lost my left ovary to a cyst the size of a lemon. It had wrapped around the fallopian tube and crushed it. I felt the pain a different points along the way. The most memorable was in the middle of a street market in Barbados during my senior class trip. My friends helped me back to our hotel room where I laid in bed until the pain went away. The next time it struck, I ended up in the hospital and in surgery. The doctor said she'd never seen a case of endometriosis that severe in someone so young. I've always prided myself on being an overachiever. Why stop in the classroom? I left the hospital one ovary short, a warning to get pregnant sooner than later, and a long purple gash running across my belly and three inches below its button.
Eight years later, that gash would be overlayed by a topographical map of flesh valleys, rivers, and ranges. I was pregnant with the only child I would be fortunate enough to carry. A baby boy whose every flip, flutter, and hiccup I can still remember. During a shopping trip with family, my little cousin Desi kept me company in the dressing room while I tried on maternity clothes. She stood there quietly sucking her thumb and tracing one particularly long mark along my side. Her small mahogany finger riding along my river bed.
I breast fed for one year. Every day I would bring an electric breast pump to work. It was the look and size of a classic workingman's tool box. On my lunch hour I would sit in the handicap stall in the women's bathroom to pump. I didn't have an office, so I'd dragged a chair into the stall and run an extension cord in as well. I sit, pump, and chat with the other women who'd come in and out. Now at age 40, I spend a fair amount of time looking at what's left of what was once a pair of majestic peaks that now appear to be the victims of tectonic plate shifting. And again with the river beds.
Yesterday, I turned on the television and an ad for Cindy Crawford's skin care line was on. How did she stay looking so young at age 41? She's only 41! I screamed back at the television! She is young! A few months ago I saw a commercial for Palmer's Cocoa Butter. Picture a young pregnant woman with her beautiful belly out for all to see. "Pregnancy, it's a beautiful thing", it begins, "but it can also leave ugly stretch marks." From beauty to shame in three seconds flat.
Jane Hirshfield writes in her poem "For What Binds Us":
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence.
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh
as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle
small triumphs pinned to the chest
I remember the first time I read the first half of that passage. It was in an Oprah magazine and I like it so much, I tore it out and tucked it away behind my jewelry box for safe keeping. For someday. That day has come.
I am tired of being to asked to diminish, reduce, erase, and minimize. Why would I want to hide the evidence of a life in which I have laughed, cried, birthed, and sustained. I have been damaged, bruised. I have stretched. I have been torn. I have been reborn a thousand times. Sometimes, it feels, in a single day.
Life marks us and those marks make us. They testify to our authenticity and I will not apply anything to this body that removes one once of its essensce, of its being but rather
a balm that recognizes, restores, and honors the beautifully broken, working vessel I am
its application a ritual that reminds me that I have been tested and still stand. Not unmarked, but bound together by a wondrous mosaic of skin light, dark, smooth, thick, scarred, raised, and wrinkled. A living fabric of scar tissue cords interwoven with muscle fiber, veins, and flesh knitted together by hope, desire, memory, will.
Proud flesh. It doesn't begin to cover it.